One of the most acclaimed films on the festival circuit last year, premiering at Berlinale and stopping by Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, and New York film festivals, Zhang Lu’s meditative drama The Shadowless Tower will now get a U.S. theatrical release next month. Ahead of a March 15 release at NYC’s Metrograph, Strand Releasing have now debuted the new trailer and poster.
Here’s the synopsis: “Gu Wentong, a food critic facing a mid-life crisis, drifts through the local eateries of a vibrant Beijing with his young, female photographer Oyang whom he harbors an unspoken attraction. With his divorcé at hand and handling a 6-year-old daughter, he’s being pressured to correct an estranged relationship with his father who he hasn’t spoken to in decades. Looking for a new perspective on life while reconsidering his failings as a father, a son, and a lover, he’s forced to make decisions to move forward. While the seasons come and go, people get together and move apart. Only one thing will remain the same: The White Pagoda is where they all meet sooner or later…”
Leonardo Goi said in his Berlinale review, “Watching over Beijing’s Xicheng district is an enormous white pagoda, a relic of the Kublai Khan rule, so majestic and otherworldly in looks and stature it might as well have been dropped on Earth from a far-flung planet. Legend has it the monument casts no shadow––not in its immediate vicinity, at least––though its silhouette is said to stretch as far as Tibet. No other corner of the megalopolis features as prominently as this one in Zhang Lu’s The Shadowless Tower, a film to which the 13th-century wonder lends its title as well as a metaphor for the kind of permanence its drifters fumble after. And no one among them is as drawn to it as Gu Wentong (Xin Baiqing).”
See the trailer below.
The Shadowless Tower opens on March 15 at NYC’s Metrograph and will expand.